Electronic design automation (EDA) is a category of systems for assisting with the design of electronic systems and devices. Large, integrated circuit designs are often assembled from previously designed blocks. This enables reduced turnaround times for generation of an integrated circuit. Schematic and layout information for such block portions of a design may be exchanged or licensed as intellectual property.
Some circuits use parallel chip architectures where multiple instances of a design block are integrated into a single circuit die, or into multiple circuit dies in a single chip package. One example of a parallel architecture is a multi-core processor. A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent central processing units, which read and execute program instructions. When a single circuit includes multiple instances of the same design, one instance may be referred to as the master while additional instances may be referred to as clones.